A traveling exhibition of worlds artfully rendered to illustrate the diverse consequences of global warming – and how these effects might be mitigated – debuts today in and around the San Diego Natural History Museum in Balboa Park.

Called “Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet,” the public art display features 42 large fiberglass globes (5 feet in diameter, 7½ feet tall), each created by a national or local artist focusing on a simple solution to a complex problem.

“The overall message is about the very simple things the average person can do to help stop global warming,” said exhibit founder Wendy Abrams. “Like turning off faucets when you're not using water or washing clothes in cold water. We're not talking about stuff like building wind farms in your backyard.”

Abrams, a Chicago-based environmentalist, got the idea for “Cool Globes” after seeing the success of CowParade, a public display of painted life-size fiberglass heifers that debuted in Chicago in 1999 and became an international craze. San Diego gets its own cow show next year – 200 of them displayed in public spaces from Jan. 3 to March 31.

Real cows, of course, are part of the global-warming problem, generating an estimated 80 million metric tons of methane gas each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. That's about one-third of annual global methane emissions. Abrams wanted her project to be part of the solution by helping people understand the issues and what they can do.

“I realized that political leaders weren't really going to act until the public demanded it,” Abrams said. “But how do you get the public to pay attention to an issue like global warming if they really don't understand it? Climate change is a very complicated subject. People can feel helpless about it, that it's just too overwhelming.”

Her answer was to change the worlds. Or, rather, invite diverse artists to each take a 2,300-pound white fiberglass sphere created by sculptor Matt Binns and decorate it in a way that depicts real and personal remedies to climate change.

Abrams premiered the result in Chicago last year, displaying 120 globes. The show was a success, and portions of it have traveled to Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. The San Diego exhibit is slated to move next to Los Angeles.

Two new globes will be created for the San Diego exhibit, one by local artist Michelle Bassler and the other by Robert Wyland, the Laguna Hills-based artist known for his murals of marine life. Wyland is scheduled to work on his globe today in the atrium of the Natural History Museum.